Marty Ramsburg
Department of Political Science
The College of Wooster
Wooster, OH 44691
U.S.A.
According to the international relations literature, states are obligated to behave in ways that ensure their survival. Historically, survival tactics have relied on increasing military arsenals to be more powerful relative to rivals. More recently, however, feminists have critiqued that narrow meaning of security by pointing to ways in which the traditional pursuit of security results in policies that nominally protect the state's inhabitants from external threats and promote state survival while simultaneously creating new internal threats to individual survival. For example, while the possession of nuclear weapons was said to protect both US citizens and the state from the perceived Soviet threat, their production generated hazardous waste which continues to threaten the health of inhabitants long after the decline and subsequent demise of the Soviet state. Indeed, the plutonium necessary to produce hydrogen weapons will remain deadly radioactive for at least the next 25,000 years (IPPNW and IEER, 1991: 31). Disposal of this waste presents a serious health hazard that falls disproportionately to women to negotiate.
This paper purposes to look at the disposal of hazardous waste from weapons production as a byproduct of militarized governance (Seager, 1993: 113). In order to do so, the paper will attempt to link the masculinized international system to the ways in which women's voices have been marginalized on the issue of health hazards related to weapons production. This paper will pay particular attention to the efforts of citizens' groups focused on the Feed Materials Production Facility in Fernald, Ohio and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Richland, Washington, both part of the nuclear weapons production complex in the United States.
Radioactive Heaven and Earth: The Health and Environmental Effects of Nuclear Weapons Testing In, On and Above the Earth, 1991. New York: Apex Press.
Joni Seager. 1993. Earth Follies: Coming to Feminist Terms with the Global Environmental Crisis. New York: Routledge.
Return to Demilitarization and Conversion
Return to Home Page (Women, Politics, and Environmental Action)